Tech in Education Requires Educating on Tech

Screen time. No, it's not the amount of time a TV show or movie devoted to a particular actor — these days, it's the amount of time students are spending engaged with technology through a screen. This can be a blessing, but also comes with issues that need to be addressed.

See how some people in the education world are handling it in this story by NPR. Follow the link to read or listen in full.

The walls are lined with robots and movie posters for Star Wars and Back to the Future. But this is no 1980s nerd den. It's the technology lab at Westside Neighborhood School in Los Angeles, and the domain of its ed-tech coordinator, Don Fitz-Roy.

"So we're gonna be talking about digital citizenship today."

Fitz-Roy is a mountain of a man, bald with just the hint of a goatee. Of the half-dozen students sitting in small, plastic chairs around him, any three could easily fit inside his shirt. And he's trying to keep them safe — from the Internet.

He's talking about the laundry list of athletes and actors these kids have seen, of late, making fools of themselves using social media.

He tells the students: "They say something online, and then suddenly they say, 'I'm gonna delete this. No, I changed my mind.' They didn't mean to say that. And it's out there."

This class is just one example of WNS' pretty radical technology policy — a policy that has second- and third-graders not just typing, but doing Internet research and computer programming.

Here's the challenge: Much of it requires screen time.

The Screen-Time Experiment

And, with so much talk these days of bad screen time, what is good screen time? It's a question that perplexes parents and educators alike.

We've heard the arguments, the warnings, the prescriptions. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that kids' entertainment screen time be limited "to less than one or two hours per day." And for kids under 2: none at all.

We recently reported on a study out of the University of California, Los Angeles. The short of it: Researchers found that sixth-graders who spent just five days at an outdoor camp, away from their electronic devices, improved remarkably at reading emotion in other people's faces.

The experiment comes with lots of caveats. It was small (roughly 100 kids). And removing screens from the equation did not, by itself, improve these kids' social skills. What likely led to the improvement was the fact that, instead of texting or gaming, the students were working together, face-to-face, constantly decoding each other's expressions, voice tone and posture.

The take-home: Social skills require constant maintenance.

The good news, according to this study, is that we can improve those skills in relatively short order, with practice. The bad news is that screen time often comes at the expense of that vital face-to-face time.

Which is why what's happening at one independent school in Los Angeles is so interesting.

Westside Neighborhood School

With kids from pre-K through 8th grade, WNS sits tucked into the shadow of a Home Depot in L.A.'s booming Playa Vista neighborhood. It's close enough to the ocean that the air is more salt than smog.

When talking about screen time and kids' access to handheld devices, Brad Zacuto, who heads the school, likes to use an old-fashioned analogy: "It's like putting a child behind a wheel of a car. There's a lot of power there."

Think about how dangerous it was back when cars first hit the road, Zacuto says. No traffic lights or street signs. That's where we are now, he warns, with kids and all this technology at their fingertips. "It's here to stay. But at some point you have to teach kids how to drive a car responsibly."

Zacuto's tech policy begins with a few basics:

First, no smartphones till sixth grade. Even then, kids can bring them, but they have to check them at the front desk.

Second, engaging and educating parents: WNS makes them sign a commitment to limit screen time at home and to keep kids off of social media — again, until sixth grade.

Also, at school, no technology until second grade. "We choose to have our youngest children engaged in digging in dirt," Zacuto says, "and building things and using their hands."

Not just their hands but their eyeballs and brains, too: interacting with other kids face to face. Because they need lots of early practice relating, reading emotion and responding to it.

In second grade, Zacuto says, kids start using classroom laptops. They get some basic lessons in typing and word processing and their first taste of Internet research.

Which makes this a good time to go back to that tech lab and Don Fitz-Roy.

'Star Wars Kid'

The idea behind Fitz-Roy's digital citizenship class is to get kids thinking hard about the dangers of social media before they have Twitter handles or Facebook pages.

The kids gathered for today's conversation are a little older than usual and have heard much of this before.

Thirteen-year-old Tom Zimmerman gets it: "One example: this one kid who was, like, in this room, and he had, like, this fake lightsaber, and he was acting really crazy. And it looked really stupid. And it was funny, but I'm sure that kid won't want it in the future. But so many people have taken that video and put it on their channels that there's no way of getting rid of it."

And that gives principals like Brad Zacuto not one but two big reasons to worry about screen time: 1) Because of what's not happening — important face-to-face time; and 2) Because of what is happening — kids putting themselves out there in embarrassing and potentially dangerous ways.

Dean Asher is a former copywriter with MBS. Though he no longer writes for us, he is still proud of having helped this blog continue to evolve as an industry-leading resource of news and original content.